David Jones and his chess king What began 14 years ago as help for his son with backyard batting practice is today Stee–Rike 3, a North Main company owned and operated by Columbia’s David Jones, producing 6,000 perforated plastic baseballs a day. Working most Saturdays, that comes to almost two million a year. Those two million practice baseballs are on the shelves among 3,500 Wal–Marts.

With a reliable income stream like that, Jones can afford to subsidize resident artists at his compound with artificially low rent. He also can spend time and materials on making a lifesized solid–wood chess set, where the king is almost six feet tall.

Meanwhile, his son runs a homebuilder’s operation on site, and a cabinet maker takes up a large part of one of the buildings. Altogether Jones has about five acres at 3527 North Main Street including his streetfront tenants, AutoZone and Professional Tire and Radiator.

The City of Columbia is putting together new zoning for Jones and his neighbors, an idea of pushing his section of North Main into a strip of high–end shops and eateries.

Jones appeared before city council last week to ask for an exception for his five–acre site. Jones has been excepted along the North Main commercial corridor of coming cutesy shops. Thanks to City Council’s reconsiderations, he continues to crank out 6,000 practice baseballs a day next to cabinet manufacturing and new home planning.

David Jones was born in Charleston where his father was an accountant for J.C. Long, the owner of Isle of Palms. His mother later finished college and taught school. Jones had three brothers. Andy, the older brother, died several years ago. The other two, Steve and Richard, live in greater Columbia. Steve has a restaurant on Highway 76 in Hilton near Lake Murray. Richard’s main product at his Southcom plant on Platt Springs Road is a light sensor that controls street lights.

Jones and his family moved to Cayce about the time he started Brookland– Cayce grammar school near Mohawk Drive. He played varsity football for the B–C high school team, both as a linebacker and as an offensive guard. He was a paperboy in Saluda Gardens and Saluda Terrace, taking out his Vespa every morning at 5:30 for most of the time he was in high school.

While enrolled at The Citadel, Jones attended summer school at USC, where he met his wife Donna Sue from Sumter. They have two sons, Brantley and Jason. Brantley runs the homebuilder’s business headquartered on the same site with his father. Jason is a film editor in New York City.

After graduating from The Citadel, Jones landed a job with Mead Johnson as a sales rep in pharmaceuticals in the Pee Dee area and also the Grand Strand. One of his customers in Myrtle Beach, a pediatrician, went in with Jones on the southeastern U.S. rights to import and sell the French–made Velo Solex. The Solex was a motor/ pedal bicycle (a “mo–ped”) with a two–horsepower motor that could be clamped down on the front tire. Jones had already started in the cycle business in Florence, where he sold Suzuki motorcycles and English–made Raleigh bicycles.

Business blossomed, and Jones further scored with the Italian–made Garelli and Vespa, where the five–horsepower motors were mounted mid–frame. His Columbia warehouse was at 1237 Gadsden Street. In the early 1980s, when Jones was distributing the Garelli and the Vespa to more than 800 dealerships in the U.S., he sold the business to California–based Norton Simon.

Jones and his brothers joined forces with highway planner Wilbur Smith, and the group bought the former Confederate Printing Plant and the S.C. Dispensary Building, near what became the Trustus Theater, which Jones also owned. One night while the roof structure was being rebuilt, high winds blew the Dispensary Building into a pile of bricks. In the early 1990s, Jones left behind the real estate development business in the Vista for Stee–Rike 3.

After 15 years, he’s leaving his lakefront house on the Ballentine side of Lake Murray once he finishes his and Donna Sue’s new 7,000 sq. ft. house in the Arsenal Hill neighborhood.